Economics, Not Ideology, Draws Members : For Jobless in Israel, Life on Kibbutz Is a Way to Eat

It would be hard to imagine anyone whose background and temperament seem less suited to life on a kibbutz. Yehuda Swissa grew up in an overcrowded working-class district of Jerusalem, and he learned early that in life it is every man for himself.

Nonetheless, Swissa, a 23-year-old husband and father, is thinking about joining a kibbutz. He is not moved by idealism, by any notions of a superior, communal society. His motives are strictly pragmatic. He has been out of work for more than a year and, given the state of Israel’s economy, his job prospects are dim.

“Under the circumstances, if you can find a place where you can eat and drink without having to borrow from the bank, that’s the place to be,” Swissa said the other day.

He is not alone. Every month about 700 Israelis apply to join one of the 275 kibbutzim scattered around the country, more than twice the number that were applying at the end of last year. Many of these people know little about life on a kibbutz except that housing and food are provided.

“More than 50% of the people who apply today do so more for economic reasons than ideological reasons,” said Moshe Gafni, head of the new membership department of Kibbutz Artzi, the second-largest of three federations that unite the kibbutzim.

Record Number Expected

The United Kibbutz Movement, the largest of the federations, expects a record number of new members this year, according to Ran Kochan, director of United’s new membership department. He said his office has five interviewers to process applicants, up from two a year ago.

Some of the applicants will find homes on a kibbutz but most will not. For one thing, the kibbutzim screen all applicants for ideological suitability, using such methods as psychological testing and handwriting analysis. Applicants without appropriately socialistic leanings are rejected as incompatible.

Also, like almost every sector of the Israeli economy, the kibbutzim are being hurt by the economic crunch, and this makes them less willing and less able to take in all the applicants.

“The feeling of most of the people right now is that we are big enough, and we are not looking desperately for new people,” said Uri Eshel, manager of Kibbutz Hazor, a collective community of about 700 people 30 miles southeast of Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, with less income expected from their agricultural and industrial enterprises, the kibbutzim are cutting expenses, among other things eliminating plans for new housing that could accommodate additional members. The grown children of members get preference for whatever housing is available.

Great Social Experiment

Here at Kibbutz Hazor a visitor can see both the appeal and the problems of what has been called Israel’s great social experiment.

The Spartan life style of the original kibbutzniks, who established the community in 1946, has long since given way to a much more comfortable way of life. One day not long ago two members were playing tennis in the modern gymnasium of the large new community center. Others were headed across well-trimmed lawns toward the community swimming pool.

The members live in modern, one- and two-room apartments and duplex units of 500 to 700 square feet. The kibbutz provides a black-and-white television set and a refrigerator, and utilities are free. Meals are served in a communal dining hall.

Although many kibbutzim have opted for a more conventional family life, youngsters at Kibbutz Hazor are still reared in a communal children’s house, with nurses and night guards. Here the children visit their parents only in the evenings, on the Sabbath and on holidays.

There are strict limits on personal property. For example, members are not permitted to own cars. The kibbutz has several and members are entitled to free use of them on a first-come, first-served basis up to a limit of about 400 miles a year. Beyond that, they must pay.

$30 for Cigarettes

Each member is allowed the equivalent of $200 a year in pocket money, $160 for clothing, $30 for cigarettes and $80 for a vacation. In theory, the individual has no other income. Even inheritances are supposed to be turned over to the kibbutz. In practice, though, the rules are sometimes stretched or even ignored.

Dinner for two at almost any restaurant in Israel would wipe out the monthly allowance for pocket money. Zami Mer, the economic director for Kibbutz Artzi, conceded this but added, “We are not going out for dinner--it’s not in our cultural life.”

Under federation guidelines, Kibbutz Hazor and most other affiliated kibbutzim have eliminated allowances for overseas travel by members for the fiscal year that will begin Oct. 1. In the past, each member was able to spend about two weeks abroad every five years.

There is also a freeze on construction of new apartments, until at least next April, Eshel said.

Like most kibbutzim, Kibbutz Hazor has diversified from its strictly agricultural beginnings. It still raises cotton, sweet corn, citrus, olives and potatoes, but its most important enterprise is Omen Metal Products, a die-casting factory that employs nearly 100 of the kibbutz’s members and generates $4 million in annual revenue.

Communal Kitchen, Laundry

Members who do not work in the factory or in the fields have other jobs. Some care for the children, some cook in the communal kitchen, some work in the communal laundry. The life style discourages many.

“A lot of people have a very basic problem in putting themselves in the hands of the collective,” Gafni conceded.

It is particularly ironic that people like Yehuda Swissa, a Jew of Moroccan origin, are scrambling to join the 76-year-old kibbutz movement. The kibbutz was the ideological and social backbone of Jewish resettlement, in the early part of this century, in what was then Palestine. The movement’s founders were idealists--many were influenced by the abortive socialist revolution of 1905 in Russia--who dreamed of a new society based on the principles of equality, democracy, hard work and voluntarism.

Most of Israel’s founding fathers came out of the kibbutz movement, and it remained to the rest of the world a romantic symbol of the new state long after its image here faded with the flood of Jewish immigrants who arrived from Arab and North African countries in the 1950s and 1960s.

To the new immigrants, the kibbutzniks were part of an elitist establishment of European origin that rode roughshod over them.

Exploited Labor

In time, many kibbutzim not only owned factories but employed outside labor. In many cases the workers were the new immigrants, and in their eyes the kibbutzniks were the bosses, exploiting their labor for profit.

When the rightist Likud bloc came to power under Menachem Begin, in 1977, largely on the votes of Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, one of the first things it did was to withdraw support from the kibbutzim and pour money instead into Jewish settlements on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River.

Prime Minister Begin, in the course of the 1981 election campaign, sneered publicly at what he called “millionaire kibbutzniks.”

The kibbutzim are still very much an Ashkenazic enclave, dominated by Jews of European or North American origin, and are identified with the leftist political bloc known as the Labor alignment.

“In the early 1950s,” Kibbutz Hazor pioneer Yitzhak Kedem recalled, “we had people from Iraq who came here. But only one has remained. She happened to marry an Ashkenazi, so it worked out.

Counterculture

“To this day the mores and culture of the eastern Jews is very much counter to the kind of thing we’re doing here. Their culture is one of climbing up--of status. To be in a situation where you do menial work is not part of it.”

About 120,000 Israelis live on kibbutzim today--3.5% of the total Jewish population. They account for about 6% of the country’s industrial production and 50% of its agricultural output, some $2 billion worth of products a year.

Despite the strong ideological element, “we don’t automatically reject people who come here for mainly economic reasons,” Kibbutz Artzi’s Gafni said, and added: “We would check out their motives on all fronts, and if we felt they were compatible socially and that their views are closely enough in line, then we would continue the process.”

In addition to psychological testing, would-be members typically make a series of increasingly long visits to a kibbutz before even being accepted as candidates. After another year or more, the kibbutz’s general assembly considers them for full membership.

Kochan, the United Kibbutz Movement official, said conditions are generating another class of applicant along with those who are economically distressed. He described these as “average, middle-class people, even professionals,” who have not been hit directly by the economic crisis but are nonetheless distressed by what they see as the “deterioration of the quality of life in town.”

1 in 3 Accepted

Traditionally, according to kibbutz officials, only about one of every three applicants is accepted for membership, and with the recent increase in interest, the proportion of acceptances is expected to be smaller.

But the officials said some extraordinary steps are being taken in light of the national economic crisis. The United Kibbutz Movement, for example, is accepting 30% to 40% fewer overseas volunteers in order to give at least temporary places to more Israelis, according to spokesman Shlomo Leshem.

Also, Leshem said, this year the movement will place 700 young men just out of the army on kibbutzim for six months. This compares with 400 last year and 200 the year before. Unemployment is particularly high among new veterans, and they are considered especially vulnerable to the attractions of emigration.

“The advantage of . . . (kibbutz life) is that the individual is not affected (by the country’s economic problems),” Kedem said. “That’s a tremendous advantage. On the other hand, some people see this as a difficulty--some think they’re on a sheltered island. Here we are, living on this island in the midst of this great difficult situation in the country, and it doesn’t seem right.”